Libertarian Free Will and the Argument from Reason (original) (raw)

The argument from reason is really a family of arguments to show that reasoning is incompatible with naturalism. Here, naturalism is understood as the idea that foundationally, there are only physical objects, properties and relations, and anything else reduces to, supervenes on, or emerges from that. For our purposes, one of the most important claims of naturalism is that all causation is passive, automatic, event causation (an earthquake automatically causes a tidal wave; the tidal wave responds passively): there are no agent causes, where something does not happen automatically but only because the agent exerts his active power by choosing to do it. The most famous version of the argument from reason is epistemological: if naturalism were true, we could not be justified in believing it. Today, I want to focus on the ontological argument from reason, which asserts that there cannot be reasoning in a naturalistic world, because reasoning requires libertarian free will, and this in turn requires a unified, enduring self with active power. The two most promising ways out of this argument are: (1) Compatibilism-even in a deterministic, naturalistic world, humans are capable of free acts of reason if their minds are responsive to rational causes; (2) Libertarian Naturalism-a self with libertarian free will emerges from the brain. I argue that neither of these moves works, and so, unless someone has a better idea, the ontological argument from reason stands. 2. Compatibilism and Human Rationality. The basic idea of compatibilism is that a decision is free if it derives from rational causes. This assumes that reasoning is compatible with determinism. On Dennett's view, you are unfree if your actions result from a closed program, like the Sphex wasp that can be made to repeat the same actions indefinitely (move a cricket to the threshold of its burrow; go inside to check if it is safe) by moving the cricket away from the threshold when it is inside (it never just drags the cricket in, but moves it back to the threshold and goes inside to check if it is safe again). 1 What's wrong with the Sphex is that it is insensitive to the obvious fact that its routine is pointless, and can't break out of the loop. However, being controlled isn't the problem: what matter is what controls you: you are free so long as your will is governed by the right (rational) causes. Thus, a demonic neurologist might rob you of freedom by inducing irrational beliefs and desires, but if we were overwhelmed by the persuasive arguments of a well-informed truthful oracle, we would still be free. So long as reason drives the bus, we can be free even if, like Luther, we could do no other. 2 A major problem for compatibilist theories of reasoning is that they don't tell us why some reasoning belongs to, or is owned by, a particular agent. The occurrence of phenomena responsive to rationality is not enough for reasoning: a notepad may be responsive to rational formulae, but it isn't reasoning; likewise a computer is responsive to a rational algorithm, but it is not reasoning for itself. This objection is standardly pressed through manipulation arguments, e.g., couldn't a kinder, gentler neurologist implant reasoning of his own in a subject? The subject is now responsive to reasoning, but his decisions are controlled by the neurologist's reasoning, not his own. This appears to show that a person's using reasons is not enough to show that he is reasoning for himself.